Thursday, July 11, 2013

Is Kafka Overrated?

Joseph Epstein, a usually pithy and insightful critic and pundit, has
concluded that Kafka’s reputation is undeserved and hinges totally on Freud.
“The spread of Freudianism and the rise of Kafka’s reputation ran, not without
good reason, in parallel. Kafka reads like Freud fictionalized.” He concludes
his essay “Is Franz Kafka Overrated?” in The Atlantic Monthly (June, 2013) by
saying, “Great writers are impressed by the mystery of life; poor Franz Kafka
was crushed by them.” Besides the somewhat erroneous assertion that Freud’s
reputation "is in radical decline"—Freud was to human nature like Marx to
economics—while both proposed impractical programs, their analyses respectively
of man and society are still hugely influential—Epstein is confusing the man
and his work. Proust wrote a famous essayentitled Contre Saint-Beuve in which he inveighed against autobiographical interpretation. Just because Kafka suffered
from ahorrible relationship with his
father, two failed relationships and the TB which ended his life at 40, doesn’t
mean that the jigsaw universe his characters occupy is lacking artistic purpose. If we make
the argument that conundrums and riddles don’t comprise the makings of great
art, then we’d have to eliminate Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex with its sphinx.
Epstein makes the point that none of the prominent Kafka scholars whose
work he cites in his piece (amongst them Erich Heller and Saul Friedlander) explain why Kafka’s work is great. But Epstein neither defines what makes a work of literature great nor explains how how masterpieces like The Metamorphosisor The Trialfail to qualify?

Thanks so much for the link, I love The Brothers K, particularly the Grand Inquisitor, but why are Dostoevsky and Kakfa mutually exclusive re their relation say to Freud? One of the critiques provided by gala writer in the link you sent has to to with incompleteness. It could be argued that that this sense of “incompleteness,” this lack of a narrative arc is what talks to Kakkaphiles.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.